Jobs data accounting for small businesses soon

NEW DELHI: The government will soon publish a set of jobs data by counting very small businesses employing less than 10 people, including those with just one employee, by tracking Mudra loans their proprietors have taken, an official aware of the plan said. The data will be the first attempt to capture the smallest segment of a vast informal sector that escapes most economic surveys.

The Pradhan Mantri MUDRA Yojana (PMMY) is a credit scheme launched by the Modi government on April 8, 2015 for providing loans up to ₹10 lakh to “non-corporate, non-farm small and micro enterprises”. These loans, given by commercial banks and small finance institutions, are called Mudra loans.

The establishment-based survey by the labour bureau, which is under way and likely to be published by year-end, will count businesses or employment generated by such firms that are outside the good and services tax network, income tax or any other attribute of formal employment, such as pensions and insurance.

Effectively, this set of data will also count proprietary shops or self-owned, self-operated businesses which may have no hired labour, such as a roadside vendor.

“The decision had been taken last year based on the recommendations of a task force. This will reveal a fuller picture of employment generation in the economy,” a labour bureau official said on condition of anonymity.

The country’s first periodic labour force survey (PLFS) for July 2017-June 2018 released by the government in June showed an unemployment rate of 6.1%, the highest in about four decades. The last “unemployment-employment survey” was carried out in July 2011-June 2012, according to which the all-India unemployment rate was 2.7%.

Each year, an estimated 12 million Indians enter the labour force, but there’s a crunch of jobs for them.